


Long-Term Partnership

by NightsMistress



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-30
Updated: 2013-06-30
Packaged: 2017-12-16 16:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Nita goes through life she learns that very few things are what she expects, but she doesn't mind anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long-Term Partnership

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



Nita used to think that becoming an adult would mean giving up the things that she loves in exchange for things like bills and mortgages. She has always known that somehow wizardry will fit in -- after all, Tom and Carl fit it in and are the better for it -- but she has never been sure how it would work for her.

She learns, over time, that her perceptions of adulthood are somewhat flawed. There are bills and responsibilities, but life as a wizard has taught Nita that there are obligations imposed on you in exchange for living. She juggles bills with groceries, work with school, housework with leisure activities and learns that being an adult is more about managing your own schedule than it is fitting into a mould.

She does love sharing a flat with Kit. She’d been warned about sharing a place with her boyfriend, and that she might want her own space, but Nita can’t imagine a space of hers that doesn’t have Kit in it. While it means that she learns a lot of his little annoying quirks -- she swears that one day he will learn when to put the toilet seat down, for one -- it means that every day she can fall in love with him again. College is good for him; it encourages his knack for machinery and history without stifling it under comments about his accent. It’s a delight to see him blossom, even if he makes a face of exaggerated disgust when she tells him that.

Nita’s own undergraduate program is in English literature at NYU, and it doesn’t have the same effect on her that Kit’s program does on him. She doesn’t enjoy it, because Nita loves to read for its own sake, and finds the brand of analysis that is required of them to rip the soul out of books and pin it quivering to a page for study.

“Why do you keep doing it?” Kit asks her late at night, when she’s nearly sobbing with frustration at trying to write a paper that is due the following day and she’s still a thousand words short. “You hate it.”

“Because,” Nita says, scrubbing at her face and scowling at her computer screen. “I can’t just give up on something because it’s hard.”

Kit looks at her for a long minute, before nodding. “All right, Neets,” he says. “But remember to get some sleep tonight. It’ll be easier in the morning.”

She finishes the last thousand words and crawls into bed with Kit at 2:00am. He wakes up enough to look at her through a squint.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey yourself,” Nita says.

That seems to be the limit of Kit’s conversational ability, as he falls asleep again shortly afterward. Nita takes his hand and closes her eyes.

She’s pleased to note when she wakes up again that they’re still holding hands.

*

The frequency of Nita being called to do an active intervention tapers off as her school work picks up. She had been told this would happen, and Nita thought that she might miss it. She’s surprised to learn that she doesn’t.

When she is called by the Powers to assist, it’s to deepen her knowledge of her gifts as opposed to learning what her gifts are. Rather than constantly being thrown into the deep end and learning entirely new branches of wizardry every few months, Nita learns more about her specialties. She learns to step outside her normal perceptions of time, to gaze backwards and forwards across what has happened and what might happen. She learns how to ease and accelerate growth, and she learns about the stellar dynamics of stars. She’ll never be Dairine’s equal with manipulating the sun -- which is only fitting, as the sun responds to Dairine in a way it won’t for any other living person -- but she understands when Dairine and Roshaun talk about its health.

She still dreams of water, of capturing the tidal wave that Aurilelde flung at her and returning it with equal force. She dreams, sometimes, of being the water, of knowing it intimately, like how she knows Kit and how he will respond when she smiles at him before using her teeth and tongue against his bare skin, the way his eyes go wide and startled when she uses her fingers as well.

She sends an email to Ronan, asking if this is how he interprets the ocean. His reply is short: _No, it’s not_. It’s the answer she expects, but not the answer she wants.

Ronan explains over Starbucks’ version of tea, which he complains about as being overly commercialized and generally terrible.

“I was _twelve_ ,” he points out. “Whyever would I think of taking in the sea like that.”

“That … does make sense,” Nita says. She struggles to imagine Ronan younger than the age he was when they first met, and the idea of Ronan being twelve is a strange thing to wrap her head around.

“It’s probably the Mars thing,” he says, trying to unsuspend the sugar from his tea so that he can extract it. “You were her analogue and you do have an affinity for water and kernel work.”

“Then what does it mean?” Nita mutters in frustration to her coffee.

“Like I know,” Ronan says. “Precognition is definitely not one of my specialties.”

Nita doesn’t get an answer until she is called on by Carmela to come and visit her at her college half a galaxy away, and she stumbles over a tidal wave that is about to wipe an island off the planet. She knows what she has to do, because she had done something like it before on Mars. She talks the wave into submission, dealing with its stubbornness how she deals with Kit’s, using her words and skill to cause it to release the tension and power wound up inside it before it wipes an island clean.

“Being around you is never boring,” Carmela tells her cheerfully while Nita recovers in her room. “Could you arrange an earthquake next week? I have exams.”

“No,” Nita says on a laugh. “Don’t let Kit hear you say that. He’ll think you’re serious.”

“He always does,” Carmela says, clasping her hands to her chest. “It’s one of his endearing traits.”

Nita grins and promises to get off Carmela’s bed before she needs to sleep.

“I’m not sure I’m okay with being compared with the ocean,” Kit tells her later, when Nita is back in her own bed.

“You’re a little alike,” she says. “But I think Ronan was right. It was the Mars thing, just in reverse.”

“Have you told him?”

“No,” Nita says. “He’s insufferable enough already. He hardly needs encouragement.” She smiles at him then. “Besides, I don’t want to talk about him right now. We have better things to do.”

*

After finishing her undergraduate degree Nita immediately re-enrolls in graduate school, specifically library and information science. Dairine sends her a teasing email from her MIT account, suggesting that she will never leave the warm academic womb. Nita ignores her. She likes school, and graduate school is what she had wanted her undergraduate program to be, even if she thinks she may never feel like she’s gotten enough sleep again.

She’s on her required internship at a small library, a requirement for her degree, when a girl dressed in a parka and jeans races past her desk and stops, frozen. Nita recognizes this look.

“Downstairs,” she tells the girl, who stares at her wide-eyed. “I’ll keep you safe.”

The girl races down the stairs to the children’s section, and a few minutes later her pursuers enter the library. They look much like any group of children that come into her library; maybe a little meaner than most but Nita might be projecting. She doesn’t think she is.

“Can I help you?” she says, radiating bored disinterest. The ringleader, a girl a few years older than her victim appeared to be, with streaks of brown in her blonde hair looks at her with veiled disgust. Nita looks back.

“Nah,” the girl says. “C’mon, we got better things to do.” She gathers her group and leaves.

Nita’s entering data into the catalog when the girl she had rescued comes up with a bundle of CDs.

“You helped me,” she says. She speaks with a broad accent, from somewhere in Canada if Nita has to hazard a guess, and she looks very startled. “No one ever helps me.”

Nita tries to hide her wince as the girl puts the CDs down to be scanned. “Maybe they just don’t see,” she says. She scans the audiobooks’ barcodes, and after she finishes places her finger on one.

“I think,” she says, her finger resting on the audio copy of ‘So You Want To Be A Wizard’, “You’ll like this one.” The girl looks at her, frowning slightly as if unsure what to say.

“I’m dyslexic,” she says finally.

“That’s all right,” Nita says. “Books are for everyone and they are the most patient of friends.” She puts her card inside the CD case. “For recommendations,” she says as the girl’s confused frown deepens. “I look forward to hearing from you.”

She receives a message from Juliette Bouchard two weeks later thanking her for her help. _Dai stihò,_ Nita sends back. _Welcome on the journey_.

“There really aren’t any coincidences,” Nita says to Kit that evening. Kit looks up from his laptop, where he’s doing a second draft of his thesis for his mechanical engineering degree.

“Yeah?” he says, blinking behind the tinted glasses he uses to reduce eye strain when reading a computer screen.

“I helped a girl a few weeks ago when she ran into my library. While I was on my internship.”

“Oh,” Kit says. His lips quirk. “That seems familiar.”

“Yeah,” Nita says. “It does. I’m glad I could help.”

*

“Hey Neets,” Kit says one day. “You know all our friends have pets?”

Now that she thinks about it, they do. Carmela has what looks like an empathic rug that she describes as being like a cat but without the clawing problem. Darryl has a hamster, which Nita thinks is unspeakably cute given that he calls it Fluffy the Terror IV. Dairine and Roshaun have joint custody of what the uninformed might call a pet rock, if a pet rock was a bit of a gossip. Ronan, to Nita’s bemusement, has a macaw with an Irish name she can barely spell let alone pronounce. Now she thinks about it, they’re the only ones who don’t have a pet.

“What do you think about a dog?” Kit says.

Nita considers the question. Realistically they shouldn’t have a dog. Neither of them have the time to properly care for a dog, and their yard isn’t big enough for a dog to roam around. Nita doesn’t even know if their lease allows pets.

“I think we should,” she says instead of her objections. 

They spend the next few hours looking over pictures of dogs at the pound. It is hard to narrow it down to just half a dozen to look at, because despite herself Nita wants to take them all home and give them a second chance at a good life. Instead, she restrains herself by helping Kit restrain himself, because he is as bad as she is if not worse.

Ironically, all the time they spent looking at animals goes to waste, as when they arrive at the pound they immediately fall in love with a black labrador.

“Kit,” Nita says. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Kit says. “Though he does look like Ponch, doesn’t he?”

It takes some weeks, which helps to smooth things over with their landlord, but finally Nita and Kit are able to bring their dog home. He adjusts to his new surroundings awfully quickly, which leaves Nita suspicious but he never uses the Speech when she can hear it until one day she hears him wish her luck when she is on her way out to do an intervention on the Hudson Bay.

“We have a wizard in the family,” she tells Kit over the phone from the beach, almost yelling over the wind. 

“We have two, Neets,” Kit points out.

“Three,” Nita says. There’s silence over the phone. “Kit?”

“I just checked my manual,” Kit says. “Our dog’s a wizard?”

“Looks that way,” Nita says.

“Ponch would have liked that,” Kit says.

“Yeah,” Nita says, smiling a little. “He would have.”

“Good luck today,” Kit says. “I’ll keep reading on our latest cousin’s escapades.”

“Thanks,” Nita says. “Let me know the good parts.”

She hangs up, and goes out with her fellow wizards to pacify a storm before it smashes into the coast of Long Island. She’s not as powerful as she was, but she’s traded power for skill and she can feel the storm bending towards their collective will. The storm’s fury eases enough that it won’t devastate the beachfront properties, though there may be some leaks.

“Another job well done,” the lead wizard yells over the wind and rain. “Go on, get warmed up and go home.”

Nita spends a moment to stare at the storm they have tamed, before teleporting into their bathroom to drip on the tiles. She runs a hot shower until she stops shivering and when she comes out wrapped in the thickest bathrobe they own Kit has a mug of hot, sweet tea for her to drink.

“You waited for me,” she says, accepting the mug.

“I always will,” Kit said.

“I know,” Nita says. “But thank you anyway.”

This isn’t what Nita expected adulthood to be. She expected adulthood to be knowing the answers to everything. She expected rigid rules and expectations, but of knowing how to respond to them. Instead, it’s hot mugs of tea late at night after coming in from a storm, with her long-term partner at her side. It’s better than she had hoped for, and for this she is glad.


End file.
